MSNBC "Hardball with Chris Matthews" - Transcript: National Football League Scandals

Interview

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Senator Richard Blumenthal is a Democrat from Connecticut who had called for a tougher punishment before Rice before what happened today. And Michelle Bernard is the president and CEO of the Bernard Center for Women, Politics and Public Policy.

Senator Blumenthal, as a former attorney general of your state, give us your sense of what criminality looks like. This picture looks like a serious crime to me.

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D), CONNECTICUT: Looks very much like a serious crime. It`s an assault, domestic violence. And you`re absolutely right that the punishment was in no way adequate. I protested and complained about it, and it took this gruesome footage to reach this result. Shouldn`t have been necessary.

But it also shows how inadequate, how sadly deficient the NFL`s new policy is. Roger Goodell has lacked the leadership to move directly to a lifetime suspension if there is this kind of assault. If there had been even the new policy, probably a six-game suspension would have been all that

(INAUDIBLE) would have been without this really gruesome video.

MATTHEWS: Michelle, your thoughts.

MICHELLE BERNARD, BERNARD CENTER FOR WOMEN: I`m stunned. I`m watching the video over and over again, and I keep wondering how anyone in the NFL could have watched that video and not known to throw him off of that --

MATTHEWS: Well, they got --

(CROSSTALK)

BERNARD: -- team immediately. But I have to believe that they saw it before.

We have a very serious problem in the country in that people do not take domestic violence seriously. We have a Congress that earlier in the year did not want to vote on the Violence Against Women Act. There`s this belief that it really doesn`t happen. We have absolute evidence right here when we look at this video that there are still people who pummel their wives and others who think that there`s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

MATTHEWS: Well, this is -- not to go into calibrations of domestic violence, but that was a heavyweight knockout punch --

BERNARD: Absolutely.

MATTHEWS: -- of your girlfriend, of your fiancee, punching her like you`re in a boxing match --

BERNARD: Absolutely.

MATTHEWS: -- with everything you`ve got. And she`s out there, prone on the floor, apparently out of -- out of conscious there.

Senator, you know the law. What is that? It`s worse than assault and battery, I would guess. What would you call that in a regular criminal case? If somebody just saw a stranger on an elevator and did that to them, what would that be?

BLUMENTHAL: That`s definitely aggravated assault. It could come close to
an attempt at even more serious damage. But as pernicious and insidious as
that assault is the fact that Janay was then stage-managed to apologize for
complaining.

That is really the antithesis of what is required in these situations, blaming the victim, having her apologetic, and then the Ravens tweeted it as exonerating Rice himself. So this kind of syndrome, the cycle of violence, blaming the victim -- and so far as the law is concerned, that would have landed Rice in prison, in my view. I would have prosecuted it as an aggravated assault.

MATTHEWS: The Ravens organization and head coach John Harbaugh stood by their star running back in May when Rice and his wife held this press conference to apologize.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RAY PRICE, BALTIMORE RAVENS: I just want to first off apologize to, you know, Steve Bisciotti, Ozzie Newsome and Coach Harbaugh, and also want to apologize to my fans. I really treat my job as a very special job, and I failed miserably. But I wouldn`t call myself a failure because I`m working my way back up.

JANAY PALMER, RICE`S FIANCEE: I do deeply regret the role that I played in the incident that night. But I can say that I am happy that we continue to work through it together.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Jemele Hill joins us right now from ESPN. What do you make of the two people there testifying? There you have the fiancee at the time, now the wife, testifying, basically saying everything`s fine.

JEMELE HILL, ESPN: Yes, I mean, I think it speaks to the level of ignorance, how tone deaf the NFL, the Baltimore Ravens, how they were with this entire issue. Anybody who I would like to think has just a cursory knowledge of the complicated dynamics of domestic violence would understand the optics of having the woman who was victimized standing next to her batterer and apologizing for her role.

I mean, what was her role, that her fist hit his -- that her face hit his
fist? That was her role in that, and certainly, that has been supported by
the video.

And so I think you had a collection of willful ignorance by the Ravens, by the NFL, that have led to this public relations blowup and nightmare. And that`s why it`s difficult for me today to give the Ravens any sort of credit for terminating Ray Rice`s contract, when this was clearly a situation that they didn`t understand from the very beginning.

MATTHEWS: Michelle, do you think this was -- the use by this professional organization, the Ravens, to take this syndrome we`re somewhat familiar with --

BERNARD: Yes.

MATTHEWS: -- where the -- where the female spouse has been beaten up by the husband or boyfriend, and for whatever combination of psychological or economic reasons -- economic reasons -- decides to let it go.

BERNARD: Well --

MATTHEWS: And they use that here and put her out there and basically apologizing for being part of that syndrome --

BERNARD: Well --

MATTHEWS: -- and she`s a victim of it.

BERNARD: But -- well, and by doing that, they are revictimizing her. You know, October 1 begins Domestic Violence Awareness Month in this country. And if we look at what`s happened to her, if we think about what we see in athletics, the fellow in South Africa, the Olympian who was accused of domestic violence and killing his girlfriend -- we`ve seen it with Chris Brown here in that area. Even locally, there was a woman who went to a judge to get a temporary restraining order against her husband, the judge pooh-poohed it, and her husband shows up at her job and throws -- throws oil on her and lights her up and almost burns her to death. It`s a very serious issue.

And when you put women in the position of apologizing for something that
allegedly led someone to batter them, you are revictimizing them. It is a
horrible thing. It`s very sad this video has become public, but on the
other hand, maybe it will allow people to actually begin to start this --
start taking it seriously.

He could have killed her. That`s a lot more than assault and battery. If she had suffered a brain injury, if she had died, he would have been guilty of murder, and then what would the Ravens have had on their hands?

MATTHEWS: Let me go back to Senator Blumenthal. Senator, what is the legal aspects? Are you -- is there legislative action you can take here in regard to this case and cases like it?

BLUMENTHAL: I`m certainly considering what legislative action there should be because what we need in this instance is not blaming the victim and stage-managing an apology from her, but emphasizing the courage and strength that women who are victims of domestic violence, survivors of this brutal crime, need to come forward and break with their past.

I`ve worked on this issue for a couple of decades now as an attorney general and now as a senator. And the scourge, the epidemic, the cycle of domestic violence, which is repeated because young men see or experience it in their own lives, requires role models from these athletes that is exactly the opposite of what we saw with Rice and a practice (ph) exactly the opposite of what we saw from the Ravens and the NFL.

So whether we can do it legislatively, whether we can seek more aggravated
penalties at the state or federal level --

MATTHEWS: Right.

BLUMENTHAL: -- my hope is that this incident will lead to changes in practices and much stronger penalties from the NFL.

MATTHEWS: It`s great to have you on, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

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